How Much Writing Do You Have to Do in Law School?

How much writing is there in law school?

Becoming a lawyer means you have to become good at a very specialized type of writing. In law, it’s not so much a matter of how much you write as how you write it. But as the saying goes: “Practice makes perfect,” and with business deals, agreements and even people’s futures on the line, if you miss an important point or choose the wrong words, the ramifications can be huge.

Here’s the main point you need to understand about writing and law school. You probably won’t be writing anything extraordinarily lengthy while at law school, but writing it will take a long time. You might spend hours on a single paragraph, tweaking it to make it just right. For the layman, legal writing might just look like a lot of words strung together, but every one of them is there for a reason and getting them right is crucial.

Your law review papers will be the longest

Most law students agree that the volume of writing isn’t so much of an issue. Your longest pieces will be law review papers, and the footnotes alone can be extensive and time-consuming. But they warn course work grades are often based on essays or papers, and the marks you get on these will make or break your pursuit of a law degree.

In the first year, chances are you’ll have to do a course covering legal research and writing. As you may have guessed, it will involve quite a lot of writing. But thereafter, the volume of written work decreases. The most important thing will be being able to write well and cram a lot of information into a few clear sentences.

So if you’re worried about required writing, the volume isn’t all that huge, but if you want to do well, you will probably need to practice not only your writing but your reading.

Practice reading?

At law school, you need to learn how to write like a lawyer, and there’s no better way of doing that than to learn to read like a lawyer. That means being able to grasp the language that is used – and believe me – although it’s English, it’s not the kind of English you’d usually use when you hang out with your buddies.

According to many law professors, reading like a lawyer is the biggest hurdle for most students. You may need hours to read a case that’s only a few pages when you first become a student. The good news is that the more you read, the better you get at understanding all the legal language, and the better equipped you’ll be when the time comes to do your own writing.

It’s a learned skill – and you will use it a lot

If reading the terms and conditions for the app you’re planning to download makes your eyes go blurry, and wading through contracts before you sign them gives you a headache, you’re not alone. Legal writing is a learned skill and uses its own special language and terminology. If you have a genuine eagerness to become a lawyer, you will need to master it.

You shouldn’t be considering a legal career if you don’t like writing. Legal writing is a bit like “blood and guts” and becoming a doctor. You might not see them all the time as a student, but when you do, things aren’t going to work out for you if you’re squeamish. Lawyers deal with words. There’s no such thing as a lawyer who doesn’t write.

Do you want to be a lawyer but not sure you’ll cope?

For a start, be absolutely sure you know what being a lawyer is like. A lot of students don’t. It’s nothing like what you see on TV. The reality of working in the legal field isn’t featured in courtroom dramas. The truth (and nothing but the truth) is that many lawyers will seldom see the inside of a courtroom. If you do end up in court, most of it will be very un-dramatic and quite boring.

Before you apply for law school read up on what being a lawyer would entail and how your career would progress. If law still sounds like just the thing for you, you can get a head start on your fellow students by reading “Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning” by Frederick Schauer. Hint: It will likely cover a lot of the work you’ll be given in your first year.

If you can grasp that legal reasoning, you’ll likely be able to manage the writing as well. Writing starts with thinking, and once you think like a lawyer, you should have the skills to write like one and get through law school.

(Photo courtesy of Mathieu Marquer)

  • Learning to write like a lawyer is like learning a different language. It really is that different from your every day English. It sucks the first year because it takes so much time, but it gets faster as you become more familiar on how to write like a lawyer. It’s definitely one of the more difficult aspects that weeds out a lot of first year students.

    • Well, this makes law school sound a lot more unfun than I already thought it was going to be. I hated languages when I was in high school, so the thought of law writing being like learning a new language makes me think that this may not be what I want to do. I want to be a lawyer, but I don’t want to hate being lawyer. I think I’m going to have to consider long and hard on this decision.

    • Lawyers have to write a lot and research even more then write down what they research. This is a very time consuming process and the amount of writing that you have to do is sometimes overwhelming. This is definitely nothing like you see on the TV there is a lot more writing involved than you might think.

      • It’s not even writing what you research; it’s synthesizing the information from numerous sources and coming up with a cogent argument that pulls it all together.

    • I’m 14 and really want to be a lawyer but I feel that reading fast and staying active while reading has always been a huge challenge for me. I’m also quite smart…mostly in the science category but I don’t really like any career in that aspect…my only choice is law…and I’m kinda scary I’ll suck in law

      • Honey, there are literally *thousands* of other occupations available to you. Law and medecine are only two of them.

  • The movie “Clueless” comes to mind. lol The main character’s dad is a lawyer and he has to write so much. His daughter and step son help him one time and they spend hours highlighting dates in stacks and stacks of paper. Ugh. I do not want to be a lawyer.

    • I don’t think you should really decide whether or not to be a lawyer based on the movie Clueless. Just saying…

  • Writing in law school is something completely new. I found that out when I start the new term. All the vocabulary is different and also the way of writing. Although difficult, it is quite possible with a lot of persistence and also practice. It might be time-consuming, but you get it after a while.

  • Most students are quite shocked when they learn that the job of a lawyer is 90% writing. That’s not only school, but he real world too. I blame it on TV shows that make it look so much different than it really is. If you don’t like to write, you don’t want to be a lawyer. It’s as simple as that.

  • Is there enough writing in law school that if I don’t like it, I should think of doing some other career? The thought of being a lawyer is appealing to me and I was thinking of going to law school after graduating from college, but I don’t like to write much. What’s your opinion?

  • This is a bit deceptive. I don’t dispute there may be a lot of writing if you want to go to law school, but there is going to be a lot of writing a matter what major you decide to pursue in graduate school. Just like there is a lot of writing when you’re in college, it doesn’t get any better when you decide to go to graduate school. That’s just the nature of academics. So, yes, there is a lot of writing you decide you want to go to law school, but there will be a lot of writing to matter what postgraduate education you pursue.

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